ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways in which masculinities can serve as a gendered category of analysis that not only complements but also helpfully complicates feminist approaches to biblical texts. It explores the contributions of critical studies of masculinities to the gendering of men and manliness in biblical texts and considers how masculinities index the concerns and ideologies of biblical writers. Drawing on insights offered by culturally situated constructs of masculinity in biblical and ancient West Asian texts and iconography, it considers how these imaginaries sustain the power of some men not only over women but also over other men who are rendered ‘less-than-masculine’ or ‘feminized’. These insights highlight the diverse, contingent, situational and relational nature of masculinities and provide a context and theoretical basis for addressing Ezra 9–10 and the issue of intermarriage in this book.
